The title and subject of this collage announce its relationship to the south of France. Picabia had moved to Mougins, near Cannes, in early 1925, and “Promenade des Anglais” was a common name for the seaside boulevards that wound through towns along the Riviera. The move sparked a renewed interest in landscape and precipitated a period of intense material experimentation, as this collage demonstrates. Palm trees are constructed from green feathers and broken-up pasta pieces, and arranged along a sand-colored avenue that recedes into the distance under a bright blue sky. The entire scene is set within a snakeskin-covered, double-winged frame, which was constructed for it in 1926 by the Parisian bookbinder and frame maker Pierre Legrain.

The overlapping, angled planes of the frame suggest shutter windows and this, combined with the structure of the scene within—the landscape subject, the tunneling perspective—seems to evoke the illusion of a view through a window, a longtime conceit of naturalistic art. With its luxe snakeskin frame, silly pasta noodles, and slick enamel paints, however, this highly artificial collage functions like a decorative and elaborate spoof on that idea.

Promenade des Anglais was first shown in December 1926, at an important exhibition of international modern art in New York, organized by the Société Anonyme, where it was displayed in this original frame. Reviewing that exhibition in The New Republic in 1926, the American historian and urbanist Lewis Mumford alluded to the work’s kitschy, tourist-postcard quality. “Picabia’s landscape, with its comically perverse use of macaroni and feathers, does not belong in a museum,” he wrote, “but it might be amusing in the window of a travel bureau.”

For Frauke Josenhans, Cynthia Schwarz, and Anikó Bezur’s essay on Promenade des Anglais (Midi), see mo.ma/picabia_conservation.